Nelson Mandela: In His Own Words.

* Nelson Mandela: In His Own Words With a Foreword by Bill Clinton and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan Little, Brown and Company, December 2004 $28.95, ISBN 0-316-11019-1

Few figures alive today can be called the embodiment of moral authority. Nelson Mandela certainly would head any such list, as the unbreakable antiapartheid freedom fighter and political prisoner turned first democratically elected president of South Africa. The mantel of his morality is well known from his biographical narrative, Long Walk to Freedom (Back Bay Books, October 1995).

Now, in Nelson Mandela in His Own Words, the scope of Mandela's political life and thoughts are chronicled in more than 100 of his speeches spanning 50 years. With an introduction by former United States President Bill Clinton and companion essays by figures close to Mandela, including the Anglican Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu and Mandela's wife, Graca Machel, who is also the former Mozambican first lady, this collection encompasses the breadth of Mandela's political struggle.

He speaks as a young leader in the 1950s, as a convicted enemy of the apartheid state facing the gallows in 1964, as a newly elected president exactly 30 years later, and as the revered elder statesman of Africa, advocating for peace on a troubled continent well into his retirement.

One can sense the fire in his belly as he responds to the white officials who offered him freedom from imprisonment in 1985 if he would renounce the armed struggle of black resistance. Mandela penned these biting words, read publicly by his daughter, Zindzi Mandela:

"What freedom am I being offered when I must ask for permission to live in an urban area? What freedom am I being offered when I need a stamp in my pass to seek work? What freedom am I being offered when my very South African citizenship is not respected?"

His personal freedom would wait five more years. When he emerged in 1990 as South Africa turned toward reform, he placed himself, once again, in service to his goal: political freedom for his nation. "I stand before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands."

This vital tome on South Africa's struggle against apartheid, or racial separation, is a treasure of African oratory and of humanity's ages-old struggles against oppression.

Lynne Duke is a staff writer for The Washington Post and author of Mandela, Mobutu and Me: A Newswoman's African Journey, (Doubleday, January 2003). [See BIBR, May-June 2004, "Africa Reborn for the 21st Century," THE WRITING LIFE.]